You'd be hard-pressed to find an Israeli who is genuinely enthusiastic about today's national elections. For many, the two frontrunners for prime minister represent a choice between bad and terrible. Tzipi Livni, the Kadima leader, is widely viewed as a decent but untested candidate with a very unimpressive list of candidates and no identifiable platform. Binyamin Netanyahu proved himself a failed prime minister 10 years ago, but voters have short memories and Bibi, as he is known, is now the favourite. If he wins, he will probably form a coalition with Avigdor Lieberman's far-right Yisrael Beiteinu.

For liberals, a "Biberman" government is a terrifying prospect. Over lunch in the cafeteria of a ministry building in Jerusalem on Sunday, a well-known diplomat insisted that the most important reason to vote for Livni was to prevent the election of Netanyahu. Vote for her because otherwise you'll have to deal with Biberman's finger on the nuclear button, he seemed to be saying.

The rise of Lieberman, a native Moldovan who once worked as a nightclub bouncer, is certainly the biggest story of these elections. Pollsters are now predicting that Yisrael Beiteinu will win more seats than Labour. This would put the party of Israel's founding secular socialists in a humiliating fourth place.

Lieberman has made his campaign slogan "No loyalty, no citizenship", directed at Israel's 20% Arab population. Below is one of his campaign ads, starting with mugshots of current and former Arab-Israeli Knesset members (MKs).

An emergency beeping sound is heard as a sign reading "A shame and a disgrace" flashes over Dehamsheh's face. It repeats for the next Arab-Israeli politician.

MK Abbas Zakour: "We are proud of Hamas and all those who support it." Monthly salary paid by the state: NIS 33,000

Again, the emergency beeping sign and "A shame and a disgrace". MK Jamal Zahalka is excoriated for saying that Arab citizens who volunteer for national service are lepers. After the slogan "Only Lieberman understands Arabic" comes footage of students demonstrating against the Gaza war at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The narrator says: "We won't forget that when the military operation in Gaza had just begun, there were those amongst us who supported Hamas." The campaign ad closes with the slogans "No loyalty, no citizenship" and "Lieberman: I believe him".

Lieberman's popularity has led to a great deal of hand-wringing and finger-pointing among the liberal left. Ha'aretz devoted a weekend magazine cover story to his campaign, with the reporter speculating that the popularity of Yisrael Beiteinu's message was the result of the ministry of education's failure to educate high school students about civics. Others think the problem lies with a poor understanding of democracy among Israel's large immigrant population from the former Soviet Union.

For those who associate Israeli far-right politics with religious extremism, it might come as a surprise to discover that Lieberman is secular, as are most of his supporters. His hawkish message is about security and loyalty to the state, not messianism or redeeming the biblical land of Israel. That is why Lieberman is willing to negotiate a two-state solution – although his definition of the term is different to its most common usages. Lieberman advocates a land-and-population transfer, with the heavily Arab triangle region of the Galilee, which borders the West Bank, being traded for the Gush Etzion bloc of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

For the Arab citizens of Israel who reside in the triangle, this means being forced to forfeit their Israeli citizenship and having Palestinian Authority residency imposed upon them. While Arab-Israelis might identify with their brethren living in the West Bank, that does not mean they wish to be arbitrarily stripped of their Israeli citizenship. Instead, they challenge Israel's definition of itself as a "Jewish democracy", advocating instead that it be defined as a democracy of all its citizens – "a democratic, bilingual, multicultural state".

For many Jewish citizens of Israel, this idea of a multicultural state for all its citizens sounds like an existential threat. If the Arab citizens want Israel to stop being a Jewish state, or a state for the Jews, then who will fight for the rights and existence of the Jews? It is this fear Lieberman feeds into (although he counters that he has Arab candidate on his party list – albeit a Druze – in the form of Hamad Ammar.

In response, the Arab-Israeli nationalist party Balad made a video clip that parodies the Lieberman campaign.

It opens with a group of Arab-Israeli MKs walking towards the camera, arms linked in solidarity, to the accompaniment of an old Arab-nationalist song by Marcel Khalife, Our National Unity. Speaking in an exaggerated Russian accent, with a touch of Arabic for good measure, an actor playing Lieberman asks a pregnant Arab woman, "How many children do you have?" "I have five children," she answers, in Arabic-accented Hebrew. "No good, no good!" answers the Lieberman figure, as he stamps the woman's ID papers with the words "not loyal".

But really, my absolutely favourite clip of this campaign is for the Green Leaf party, which has a single platform – the decriminalisation of cannabis. Headed by a comedian named Gil Kopatsch, the party will almost certainly not receive the minimum number of votes necessary for a seat in Knesset. But if an imaginative – and hilarious – campaign were enough to win, they would be in.

The clip below shows Kopatsch smoking a joint while sitting on the grave of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister. In this pastoral and politically significant setting, Kopatsch offers Ben-Gurion his insight on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

David, We haven't talked for so long. Do you want a drag? Oh yeah, you only smoke cigarettes. You know what, David, there are over a million people in this country who smoke this stuff. Do you know how much it costs me? A fortune! And do you know who grows and produces it? Hamas and Hizbullah! Yes, David, yes. As a former minister of defence, it's important for you to know this. They're making a fortune out of this stuff, and they're using the money to buy rockets to launch at us. Isn't that a pity, David? Why shouldn't this be legal? If it were legal we could cultivate it here in the Negev and we could use the money to achieve positive goals!

The question is, says Kopatsch, what would Hamas and Hizbullah do with all the stuff they can't sell to us? "And the answer is simple: they'd smoke it themselves!" he says. "They'd smoke it themselves, and they'd be relaxed. And a good Arab is a relaxed Arab." (A play on the far-right Israeli slogan "a good Arab is a dead Arab".)

Kopatsch takes a deep drag, exhales and stares into the distance as he summises: "That's my take on security issues".